What Came Before
487 Words
What Came Before
THE ALIEN chewed its way out of Antarctica, devouring every living thing it found and spitting out exact duplicates. Even the duplicates didn’t know they were human ghosts, clothed in alien flesh. The alien’s infiltrators in schools and subways and office towers transformed into tentacled horrors in less time than it took to drain a boil, engulfing entire cities in its relentless crawl north. Humanity fought, hard, eventually using nuclear missiles to turn Australia into glass. Four months later, they cauterized South America and sub-Saharan Africa. The alien subverted the oceans, using those secret depths to crawl around the globe in plankton and dolphins and squid, shrugging off explosives and poisons.
Surviving nations turned everything against the invader. Cities became armed bunkers, every resource conscripted for defense. Toxic plutonium dumped in the seas was a problem for tomorrow, if it could help buy today. Today was about escaping extinction, even as the alien crept to surround the northern continents.
At the end, the very end, with the alien surging up every waterline in the world to nibble on the last remnants of the human race, police detective Kevin Holtzmann snatched his wife and daughter and fled from the eastern shore of Michigan out into the western United States.
They almost survived. They never had a chance. Any hope was a doomed, desperate delusion. The alien, incarnated as a murderous psychopath Kevin had put away years before, trapped them in the wastes of Utah.
Kevin shot his wife and daughter before the alien could torment them, allowing them the dignity of a quick, painless death before turning the gun on himself.
But he was too slow.
The alien ate Kevin alive.
Once it devoured every living thing and grunted out duplicates of it all, once the alien owned the world, was the world—it set Kevin’s copy and every copy near me free to live in a remade land.
If I don’t watch myself, I forget I’m not Kevin. I remember killing my wife and daughter to keep the alien that calls itself Absolute from eating them alive. I still have a blister under my chin, from when Kevin jammed the savagely hot barrel of his Springfield XD under his chin and tried to pull the trigger.
I am not Kevin. He murdered his family. Not me.
Like everyone else in Frayville, I’m a copy.
Our world has changed. Despite being clothed in alien flesh, people remain people. Which means, even with the new rules, some people will break the rules for their own gain. I plan to be the guy who puts a stop to that.
Kevin is dead. I have his memories, but this is my life. I’m going to be one of the good guys.
Whatever that means.
And Absolute, a genocidal alien many times over, that murdered Kevin, the human race, and the world?
Some way, somehow, I will make it pay. And pay. And pay.
No matter what it takes.
- Writer
